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For much of Sydney’s history, the city supported its population with crops, orchards, dairies, abattoirs, oyster beds, wineries and market gardens scattered across the basin.

In 1951, New South Wales’ soon-to-be premier Joseph Cahill saw the development pressures building on the city’s food bowl. In parliament, he promised Sydney’s rural areas would be preserved “for vital food production […] soil conservation, irrigation, afforestation”.

Cahill’s promise was in vain. Farms continued to be paved over or turned into housing as the suburban expansion gathered pace. Smaller urban farms disappeared in the face of pressures from developers and larger rural producers. Urban development has now severely weakened Sydney’s local food economy.

Sydney still has room to grow food, which would boost resilience in the face of climate threats and extreme weather. But the city has long been geared towards converting farmland into houses, shops or industries. Today, the city’s five million residents rely almost entirely on food transported into the city’s topographic basin.

We have unearthed the diversity of what was lost in our new book, Sydney’s Food Landscapes and in our Google Maps database of the city’s former wealth of food production sites.

Botany: Sydney’s backyard vegetable garden

In 1770, the naturalist Joseph Banks recorded the botanical abundance of Kamay (Botany Bay). He later convinced the British House of Commons this would quickly lead to a self-sustaining colony. Following reconnaissance, Governor Arthur Phillip moved the settlement north to Port Jackson, but European crops didn’t grow well in the sandstone soils.

The colony almost collapsed in the “hungry years” of 1788–92. Soil fertility is usually blamed for this, but we argue poor agricultural planning and social factors were also central causes.

In the mid-19th century, Botany became a prolific food district. Chinese market gardeners transformed sandy wetlands through highly productive cooperatives, ingenuity, irrigation and liberal application of night soil as fertiliser. At their peak, market gardeners supplied up to half the city’s vegetables, hawking vegetables such as cabbages and turnips door to door.

Prejudice and industrialisation intervened. In 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act came into effect – laws aimed at limiting Chinese migration. Market garden leases were withdrawn amid persistent racism.

By the 1970s, most had been displaced by factories, ports and airports, with a few gardens remaining today at Matraville, La Perouse, Arncliffe and Kyeemagh – fragile traces of an industry once vital to Sydney’s food security.

Hawkesbury: Sydney’s engine room

From Botany, the story moved inland. Wheat and maize fields in Parramatta proved the colony’s first real agricultural success, but slash-and-burn practices soon exhausted soils. Farmers switched to citrus orchards, planting as widely as Pittwater.

Dyarubbin (the Hawkesbury River) was the true catalyst making the colony viable. In the 1790s, these rich floodplains became the “granary of the colony”. The Darug had cultivated the yam daisy, murnong, on these flats for millennia. The bloody dispossession known as the Sydney Wars lasted decades.

Convicts, ex-convict emancipists and opportunistic officials planted wheat, maize, fruit and vegetables. By 1810, Governor Lachlan Macquarie had proclaimed five farming towns to secure food supply.

Sadly, even Sydney’s most fertile soils for agriculture would succumb to suburbanisation after World War II. Large land parcels continue to be lost. Turf-growing, ornamental plants and cut flowers further typically prove more lucrative than food.

Lost landscapes

Botany and the Hawkesbury are only part of a kaleidoscopic legacy.

Histories range from the troubling use of child labour to produce 40,000 cabbages a year on Cockatoo Island, to local triumphs such as the Granny Smith apple and Narrabeen Plum varieties.

Six cows brought by the First Fleet escaped and made their way to rich grasslands. When rediscovered in what is now Camden, their numbers had multiplied. The rich “Cowpastures” catalysed a pastoral industry which would eventually dominate half the continent.

Dairies proliferated, with 517 registered in 1932. The gaols at Parramatta and Long Bay produced convict-grown crops. Liverpool became home to Australia’s first irrigation district in 1856, before giving way to industrial-scale poultry farming and billion-dollar empires.

Oyster leases producing what were praised as “the world’s finest oysters” dotted the Georges River. Warriewood’s “glass city” of greenhouses foreshadowed Spain’s plastic megafarms.

Vineyards expanded before the Phylloxera mite devastated much of the industry in 1888. One of the oldest wineries was paved over in 2015 for the construction of the Western Sydney International Airport. In the early 20th century, the St George region became Sydney’s “salad bowl”.

Could it have been different?

England gives its farmland greater protection through green belts, while Oregon in the United States relies on urban growth boundaries. Japan uses “productive green zones” to protect millions of farms ringing large cities and the European Union has policy settings to help small and medium producers near cities.

By contrast, Sydney has historically treated farming as a mere transition stage before urban development. Mid 20th century plans for a green belt collapsed under developer pressure, as agriculture was written out of official metropolitan plans.

Eating the future

As development squeezed out local food production, more and more food had to be brought in. Sydney now relies on trucks, ships and planes importing food from farms hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. The energy required for transport is greater than the calorific energy in the food. The city’s food system is exposed to natural disasters, global supply shocks and climate volatility.

Over the last 70 years, Sydney has engulfed most of its local food producers. It wasn’t due to poor soils, floods or disappointing harvests. It was a deliberate choice to privilege capital gains above all else.

It’s a slow process to re-centre a city around local food production. But it can be done, if planners and decision makers protect farms and food producers the same way they protect heritage buildings, parks and water catchments. Like clean water, food production has to be treated as vital civic infrastructure – not expendable land. Not all has been lost. Western Sydney still has available farmland.

Sydney may have eaten itself. But it need not starve. Its spectral metropolitan food landscapes offer both warning and inspiration for more resilient, equitable and sustainable futures.

Joshua Zeunert, Scientia Associate Professor in Environmental Design, UNSW Sydney and Alys Daroy, Lecturer in English and Theatre, Murdoch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You’ve probably encountered images in your social media feeds that look like a cross between photographs and computer-generated graphics. Some are fantastical – think Shrimp Jesus – and some are believable at a quick glance – remember the little girl clutching a puppy in a boat during a flood?

These are examples of AI slop, low- to mid-quality content – video, images, audio, text or a mix – created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy. It’s fast, easy and inexpensive to make this content. AI slop producers typically place it on social media to exploit the economics of attention on the internet, displacing higher-quality material that could be more helpful.

AI slop has been increasing over the past few years. As the term “slop” indicates, that’s generally not good for people using the internet.

AI slop’s many forms

The Guardian published an analysis in July 2025 examining how AI slop is taking over YouTube’s fastest-growing channels. The journalists found that nine out of the top 100 fastest-growing channels feature AI-generated content like zombie football and cat soap operas.

Listening to Spotify? Be skeptical of that new band, The Velvet Sundown, that appeared on the streaming service with a creative backstory and derivative tracks. It’s AI-generated.

In many cases, people submit AI slop that’s just good enough to attract and keep users’ attention, allowing the submitter to profit from platforms that monetize streaming and view-based content.

The ease of generating content with AI enables people to submit low-quality articles to publications. Clarkesworld, an online science fiction magazine that accepts user submissions and pays contributors, stopped taking new submissions in 2024 because of the flood of AI-generated writing it was getting.

These aren’t the only places where this happens — even Wikipedia is dealing with AI-generated low-quality content that strains its entire community moderation system. If the organization is not successful in removing it, a key information resource people depend on is at risk.

Harms of AI slop

AI-driven slop is making its way upstream into people’s media diets as well. During Hurricane Helene, opponents of President Joe Biden cited AI-generated images of a displaced child clutching a puppy as evidence of the administration’s purported mishandling of the disaster response. Even when it’s apparent that content is AI-generated, it can still be used to spread misinformation by fooling some people who briefly glance at it.

AI slop also harms artists by causing job and financial losses and crowding out content made by real creators. The placement of this lower-quality AI-generated content is often not distinguished by the algorithms that drive social media consumption, and it displace entire classes of creators who previously made their livelihood from online content.

Wherever it’s enabled, you can flag content that’s harmful or problematic. On some platforms, you can add community notes to the content to provide context. For harmful content, you can try to report it.

Along with forcing us to be on guard for deepfakes and “inauthentic” social media accounts, AI is now leading to piles of dreck degrading our media environment. At least there’s a catchy name for it.

Adam Nemeroff, Assistant Provost for Innovations in Learning, Teaching, and Technology, Quinnipiac University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Every once in a while, you may look up towards the Sun and see strange bright lights on either side of it. Or perhaps you’ll be sitting in an aircraft, looking out the window at its shadow and see a circle of light, like a halo below (known as glories). Or, if you’re really adventurous, maybe you’ll even be out on a midnight walk with a full moon lighting your way, and see what appears to be a rainbow encircling the moon.

These are all beautiful examples of atmospheric optical phenomena. And a new paper has suggested they may appear in alien skies too.

These celestial wonders can tell us a lot about the state of the atmosphere at home on Earth as well as on other planets. Rainbows, for instance, the most well-known of these phenomena, can only form when light passes through spherical liquid droplets, like our normal rain on Earth. Therefore, there must be spherical liquid droplets in the atmosphere where the rainbows are observed.

Most planet atmospheres have some kind of crystalline aerosols (clouds of tiny particles) in them, from sodium chloride in Io (one of Jupiter’s moons), to carbon dioxide crystals in Mars. On Earth, these are generally ice crystals, often found in clouds as snowflakes. The orientation of these crystals, and how they change the light, dictates the type of optical phenomena you can see.

Sun dogs are another of these phenomena, where bright lights appear on either side of the Sun, sometimes even splitting white light into the colours of the rainbow. They form because of the light being bent by horizontally oriented hexagonal ice crystals high up in the atmosphere. If you want the best chance of seeing these, you should try to be at the same latitudes as Europe or Argentina during wintertime. Look for high altitude wispy clouds that are in front of the Sun, and you might get lucky.

Horizontal ice crystals can also create light pillars in extremely cold conditions, which look like coloured beams of light trailing to clouds over head. Vertical crystals form parhelic circles – a circle of light at the same height as the Sun. And crystals aligned with the electric fields above thunderstorms create crown flashes.

The new paper proposes that, from what we know of our own atmosphere, we can presume that similar optical phenomena happen on planets outside of our solar system (called exoplanets). It’s just a matter of spotting them and finding out why they occur.

Previous studies have shown that on many exoplanets the crystalline aerosols in their atmospheres are moved around and oriented in a multitude of different ways, much like on Earth.

Magnetic fields swirl around the planet, as they do on Earth, pushing and pulling along field lines. On Earth, this can be seen as the northern lights phenomena. Radiation pressure from a planet’s parent star pushes the crystals using the power of light, much like how the wind pushes boats. And the wind, often much faster than anywhere on Earth, speeds around the exoplanet, rushing from the hot, star-facing side of the exoplanet to the colder space-facing side as the planet spins.

A special type of exoplanet, hot Jupiters (so named because they’re huge, gassy and very hot) generally have incredibly fast winds (up to 18,000km/h) and high densities of crystalline aerosols, much like an incredibly fast-moving sandstorm.

This means that the main way that the crystals are oriented is through the superfast winds spinning around the planet. Imagine a fleet of boats all randomly turned around in a patch of ocean, then a massive gust of wind comes, turning them all so that they’re facing the same direction.

The researchers on the new paper previously used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find evidence for tiny quartz crystals in the high altitude clouds of a hot Jupiter 1,300 light years away from Earth (WASP-17 b). These crystals have an elongated shape, like boats, so are more likely to be oriented with the wind. This led them to think about what optical properties could be seen with the wind-aligned crystals.

The optical phenomena that come from the crystals being oriented the same way cannot be seen by normal cameras. But scientists can use instruments such as those on the JWST to observe these effects.

We have already gained valuable information about faraway atmospheres from looking at their optical phenomena using the JWST. For example on Venus, rainbows and glories have been used by scientists to decipher the mysteries of Venus’ extreme heats and yellow colour.

A similar technique of observing glories has been used to detect the presence of long-lasting clouds on the exoplanet WASP-76b. The new knowledge of these clouds gives us insight into the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Now we know that there can be conditions for a stable temperature, which surprised scientists as half of the planet is hot enough to melt iron.

We can also guess what optical effects might occur on planets where we know what the atmosphere is made of. For example, in the high atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, where a special type of ammonia crystals are concentrated, we would expect to observe four separate sun dogs. Alas, on Earth, we can only ever see two at a time due to the shape of our atmospheric ice crystals.

Who knows what other wondrous phenomena we may see on other worlds. Who’s to say whether there couldn’t be a planet surrounded by continual rainbows? There is much more to learn about so many exoplanets. Optical phenomena such as sun dogs can tell us huge amounts about their atmospheres, which could help us in the search for habitable planets in the future.

Peter Berthelemy, PhD Candidate in Atmospheric Physics , University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists have discovered that Mars has an interior structure similar to Earth’s. Results from Nasa’s Insight mission suggest that the red planet has a solid inner core surrounded by a liquid outer core, potentially resolving a longstanding mystery.

The findings, which are published in Nature, have important implications for our understanding of how Mars evolved. Billions of years ago, the planet may have had a thicker atmosphere that allowed liquid water to flow on the surface.

This thicker atmosphere may have been kept in place by a protective magnetic field, like the one Earth has. However, Mars lacks such a field today. Scientists have wondered whether the loss of this magnetic field led to the red planet losing its atmosphere to space over time and becoming the cold, dry desert it is today.

A key property of the Earth is that its core has a solid centre and liquid outer core. Convection within the liquid layer creates a dynamo, producing the magnetic field. The field deflects charged particles ejected by the Sun, preventing them from stripping the Earth’s atmosphere away over time and leading to the habitable conditions we know and enjoy.

From residual magnetisation in the crust, we think that Mars did once have a magnetic field, possibly from a core structure similar to that of Earth. However, scientists think that the core must have cooled and stopped moving at some point in its history.

On the surface of Mars there is a tremendous amount of evidence that liquid water once flowed, suggesting more hospitable conditions in the past. The evidence comes in many forms, including dry lake beds with minerals that formed under water, or the dramatic valley networks carved by rivers and streams. However, the Martian atmosphere is thin today and the necessary amount of water is nowhere to be found.

Teams working with the seismometers on Nasa’s InSight Mars lander first identified the Martian core and determined that it was actually still liquid. Now, the new results from Huixing Bi, at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and colleagues, show that there may also be a solid layer inside the liquid core.

The nature of the interior structure of Mars has been an intriguing mystery. Was it ever like Earth’s, with a dynamic liquid layer around a solid centre? Or did Mars’ smaller size prevent such a formation? How big must a planet be to gain the protection of a magnetic field, like Earth’s, and support a habitable climate?

To understand what happened, how Mars evolved, we need to understand Mars today. These questions about Mars’ atmosphere, water, and core have motivated several high profile Mars missions. While the Nasa Mars rovers, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance have studied the surface mineralogy, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is studying the water cycle, Nasa’s Maven spacecraft is studying atmospheric loss to space, and Nasa’s InSight lander was sent to study seismic activity.

In 2021, Simon Stähler, from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and colleagues, published a seminal paper from the InSight mission. In it, they presented an analysis of the way that seismic waves pass through Mars from Mars quakes in the vicinity of InSight, through the mantle, through the core, and then reflecting off the other side of the planet and reaching InSight.

They detected evidence of the core for the first time and were able to constrain its size and density. They modelled a core with a single liquid layer that was both larger and less dense than expected and without a solid inner core. The size was huge, about half of Mars’ radius of 1,800 km, and the low density implied that it was full of lighter elements. The light elements, such as carbon, sulphur, and hydrogen, change the core’s melt temperature and affect how it could crystallise over time, making it more likely to remain liquid.

The solid inner core (610 km radius) found by Huxing Bi and colleagues is hugely significant. The very presence of a solid inner core shows that crystallisation and solidification is taking place as the planet cools over time.

The core structure is more like Earth’s and therefore more likely to have produced a dynamo at some point. On Earth, it is the thermal (heat) changes between the solid inner core, the liquid layer, and the mantle that drive convection in the liquid layer and create the dynamo that leads to a magnetic field. This result makes it more likely that a dynamo on Mars was possible in the past.

With Simon Stähler and co-authors reporting a fully liquid core and Huxing Bi and colleagues reporting a solid inner core, it might seem as if there will be some controversy. But that is not the case. This is an excellent example of progress in scientific data collection and analysis.

Competing models of Mars

InSight landed in November 2018 and its last contact with Earth occurred in December 2022. With Stähler publishing in 2021, there is some new data from InSight to look at. Stähler’s model was revised in 2023 by Henri Samuel, from the Université Paris Cité, and colleagues. A revised core size and density helped reconcile the InSight results with some other pieces of evidence.

In Stähler’s paper, a solid inner core is specifically not ruled out. The authors state that the signal strength of the analysed data was not strong enough to be used to identify seismic waves crossing an inner core boundary. This was an excellent first measurement of the core of Mars, but it left the question of additional layers and structure open.

For the latest study in Nature, the scientists achieved their result through a careful selection of specific seismic event types, at a certain distance from InSight. They also employ some novel data analysis techniques to get a weak signal out of the instrument noise.

This result is sure to have an impact within the community, and it will be very interesting to see whether additional re-analyses of the InSight data support or reject their model. A thorough discussion of the broader geological context and whether the model fits other available data that constrain the core size and density fit will also follow.

Understanding the interior structure of planets in our Solar System is critical to developing ideas about how they form, grow, and evolve. Prior to InSight, models for Mars that were similar to Earth were investigated, but were certainly not favoured.

Kevin Olsen, UKSA Mars Science Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Oxford and Mhairi Reid, DPhil Student, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a fashion sustainability researcher, finding the ReTuna shopping mall in Eskilstuna was a delightful surprise. Stepping into this Swedish shopping centre felt refreshingly different – it is the first in the world to sell only secondhand and repurposed items.

During numerous visits to the shopping mall over the last 18 months, I have spoken to customers, managers and employees – all of whom seemed excited by ReTuna’s innovative business model.

The mall instantly feels very different to the cluttered charity shops or vintage boutiques most of us associate with pre-owned retail. There is a wide range of products on sale – fashion, sports equipment, household items, children’s toys, antiques – and even an Ikea secondhand store selling previously used and repaired furniture.

This is not just a retail space. It is a municipality-led experiment in circular consumption, where everything sold has been donated by the public.

ReTuna was established in 2015 as part of Eskilstuna’s climate and waste reduction strategy. Built alongside the city’s recycling centre, it includes a dedicated drop-off point called The Return, where residents donate unwanted items. These are sorted and redistributed to the retailers in the mall, creating a low-cost, low-waste circular system.

The model is only possible because of public funding and local government support – a reminder that circular innovation often requires structural investment, not just consumer goodwill.

However, what makes ReTuna so distinctive is not just its inventory but its atmosphere. Consumers describe it as “accessible”, “curated” and “convenient”. The mall’s layout and product displays mirror conventional retail spaces, making secondhand shopping feel stylish and enjoyable.

One shop manager told me customers often mistake the secondhand items for new, a testament to how fashionability and design are used to make reuse attractive without increasing cost. At ReTuna, the clean, calm environment helps make ethical consumption feel desirable and emotionally rewarding. As one shopper put it: “It’s not just ethical, it’s beautiful.”

Retailers use low-cost stock and infrastructure to create visually appealing stores. The result is a pleasurable shopping experience that challenges the stigma of secondhand. While affordability and environmental values remain central, ReTuna also reimagines what sustainable retail can look and feel like.

Demand for pre-loved

Consumer interest in “pre-loved” fashion is accelerating, with the secondhand market growing 2.7 times faster than the broader apparel market, according to one recent industry report. Globally, it is projected to reach US$367 billion (£272 billion) by 2029.

And it is not only pre-owned fashion that is growing. Another market research report forecasts the wider secondhand products market will reach US$1.04 trillion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of 17.2%.

In a YouGov survey spanning 17 markets, 43% of secondhand buyers favoured instore purchases, compared with 39% who preferred online (19% were undecided). ReTuna is part of this shift – not as an outlier, but a glimpse of what mainstream retail could become.

This pioneering Swedish mall turned ten this year. It has grown from a local government initiative to an internationally recognised model of circular retail. The mall’s success shows that secondhand shopping does not have to feel like a compromise – it can be stylish, convenient and socially meaningful.

Circular retail is not just about what we buy, but how and where we buy it. ReTuna demonstrates that with the right infrastructure, design and public support, sustainable consumption can be embedded into everyday life – not as a chore but a rewarding experience.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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Mary-Ann Ball, Senior Lecturer, Fashion Sustainability and Marketing, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has stirred debate by calling the familiar five-a-day message “a lie”. Speaking to the Times, he argued that the real health benefits of fruit and vegetables only start to add up at seven, eight or even 11 portions a day.

He’s not wrong that more is better. Research shows us that the more servings of fruit and veg we eat per day, the more benefits we see to our health. But the story of how five servings became the standard recommendation is one of science meeting pragmatism.

When the five-a-day campaign was launched in the UK and Ireland more than 20 years ago, it was never meant to be the “perfect” target. Instead, it was a compromise – a number that struck a balance between the nutritional evidence and what public health experts thought people might realistically manage. Five portions was judged by researchers and marketeers to be a simple, memorable and achievable slogan – one that wouldn’t scare people off.

Today, five-a-day is one of the most recognisable public health messages – even if most UK adults still fall short of it.

But it may be time for this messaging to change, as a growing body of research shows that higher fruit and vegetable intakes are associated with lower risk of chronic diseases.

A meta-analysis of over 2 million people found that while five portions lowered risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer, the greatest benefits were seen at around ten portions of fruit and veg daily. Another UK study found that people eating seven or more portions of fruit and veg each day had a 42% lower risk of death compared to those eating less than one portion.

Excellence rarely comes from doing the bare minimum – and the evidence suggests we should be aiming higher.

Japan has long recommended ten (and more) portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Mediterranean countries, too, traditionally eat diets rich in fresh produce, beans, and legumes. Research suggests that populations that follow these dietary patterns tend to have lower rates of heart disease and longer life expectancy. Similar associations between higher intakes of fruit and vegetables and lower risk of death from any cause are reported in Japan, too.

The research is clear: higher intake of fruits and vegetables everyday brings tangible health benefits. So while five portions is a good starting point, aiming to include more fruits and vegetables into your daily diet will bring even greater health benefits.

What counts as a portion?

But some confusion lies in what a “portion” really means. The World Health Organization defines one portion as about 80g – roughly a handful. That could be an apple, two broccoli spears, three heaped tablespoons of peas or half a tin of beans. When you break it down like this, eight to 11 portions across three meals and snacks becomes less intimidating.

There are also many easy ways to add more fruit and veg every day. For breakfast, try adding berries to your cereal, a banana to your porridge or spinach in your omelette. For lunch, add salad to sandwiches, beans to your soup or extra veg into wraps.

Double up portions at dinner by eating two or three sides of veg, or bulk up sauces and curries with lentils, peppers or mushrooms. Snack smart by reaching for fruit, veggie sticks with hummus or roasted chickpeas instead of crisps.

You should also aim to eat a rainbow of different fruits and vegetables across the week, as variety is associated with even greater health benefits.

There’s a common myth that only fresh fruit and vegetables count. In reality, frozen, tinned (in water or natural juice) and dried all have a place. They can be cheaper, last longer and often retain just as many nutrients as fresh produce.

Juices and smoothies count too – but only as one portion a day because of their sugar content.

The five-a-day message is a starting point, but not the finish line. Anything is better than nothing – and if you’re eating just one or two portions now, getting to three or four is progress.

But the science is clear: more really is better. Jamie Oliver may be ambitious in suggesting 11 portions, but he’s right that aiming higher could bring big health gains.

Catherine Norton, Associate Professor Sport & Exercise Nutrition, University of Limerick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The wildflowers of Britain include all manner of treasures – yet many people are only aware of a few, such as bluebells and foxgloves. A lot of its other flora are rare because of Britain’s location at the northern, western or even southern edges of their natural geographic – and hence climatic – ranges.

In fact, Britain has over 1,000 native species of wildflower, including 50 kinds of orchid, a few species like sundew that use sticky tentacles to eat insects, and others such as toothwort that live as parasites, plugging their roots into other plants to suck on their sap like botanical mosquitoes. There are even a few species, such as the ghost and bird’s-nest orchids, that extort all their food from soil fungi.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories.

This story is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

I’ve been an obsessive plant hunter since I was seven years old. Wishing to share this wonder with others, I began running informal classes in plant identification about 17 years ago. This has grown into a quest to get people looking at and identifying wildflowers, in the hope of curing “plant blindness” – the inability to see or notice plants in your own backdrop – which afflicts so many people.

Initially, I taught plant ID classes in person. But when the pandemic hit, I needed an online resource with high-quality images of British plants arranged by family. No such resource existed online, so I decided to create it.

And so began a five-year mission to photograph the entire British flora myself. That process is now close to complete, and the results can be seen on the website I have created.

This photographic quest took me to all parts of the British Isles – to famous rare-plant hotspots like the Lizard in Cornwall, Teesdale in county Durham and Ben Lawers in the Scottish highlands, and from the north coast of Scotland (where the endemic Scottish primrose grows) to the chalk downs of Kent, where many rare orchids can be found.

I did cheat a bit – for example, using living collections of rare plants in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden and the incredible Rare British Plants Nursery in Wales.

Brownfield havens

Oddly, cities and especially brownfield sites can be havens for biodiversity. Recently, a student and I both collected material from York for a plant ID session. I pottered around pavements and riverside concrete while she cycled to the nearest woodland – but I got more species.

Brownfield sites are often alkaline (from the lime in concrete) and nutrient-poor, both of which encourage plant diversity. This is also why chalk and limestone grassland is so rich in species.

Species that struggle for a foothold among a countryside dominated by agriculture can thrive in such apparently unpromising places. For example, Monktonhall bing, a coal slag heap five miles from the centre of Edinburgh, is home to numerous locally rare species.

The nearby wasteground was equally diverse but is being lost to development – although the rare yellow bird’s-nest plant which fellow scientist Vlad Krivtsov and I discovered there has narrowly escaped destruction, so far.

In some ways, brownfield sites are the silver lining to all the habitat destruction humans have caused. But not all these sites are equal, of course, and it would be wonderful if developers would choose the less biodiverse brownfield sites to build much-needed housing.

Our rare flora

Some species have turned out to be a lot rarer than expected. I made extensive use of maps and data from the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, and this showed that species like the downy currant had far fewer sites than I had assumed. This reflects a general trend of decline in our native flora.

The slender naiad appears to have been wiped out in England by sewage discharges, while the endemic English sandwort may be heading towards extinction due to climate change.

Other species, such as the lesser butterfly orchid, have been steadily declining over many decades – probably due to so much of the British countryside being rendered a biological desert by monoculture farming, spruce plantations or intensive grazing. Research shows less-intensive grazing might benefit Britain’s biodiversity.

I was also able to take fine images of rare British species during trips to Norway, Estonia and Corfu. Military and lady’s slipper orchids are all far more common in Estonia than Britain, and in Corfu I found a single roadside ditch with perhaps more adderstongue spearwort plants than the entire UK population.

Most species look similar at home or abroad. But the marsh gentian looked so unexpectedly different in Estonia that I had to track it down again in the UK.

Try it yourself

In late summer, the number of species in flower declines a little, but many large and spectacular flowers remain to be found. Canadian goldenrod, Michaelmas daisy and Indian balsam are all garden escapes, displacing native flora but providing a bounty of food for pollinators.

If you can visit alkaline grassland such as chalk downs, many native treasures await discovery, such as purple autumn gentians and the spiralling flowers of the autumn lady’s tresses orchid. However, almost any site will turn up one or two interesting plants, which my website can help you identify.

It’s true that these days, you can point a mobile phone app at a plant and get a name for it, so why try to teach people identification skills? Well, we don’t learn much when an app or a teacher simply gives us the answer. We learn from getting there ourselves.

My website uses plant families – natural groupings of related species. Just answer a few simple questions about your mystery flower’s number of petals, symmetry and arrangement, and you’ll get a list of families it might belong to. It then generates a picture ID guide, built from my images and comprising only those families, through which you can seek out your plant – all the while, learning to recognise each family of plants for yourself.

In my own quest, a handful of species still elude me – many of them hard-to-identify grasses or ephemeral rarities that seldom appear in the same place two years running. But these are unlikely to concern most amateur plant hunters as there are so many wildflowers to enjoy out there. Try improving your own ID skills at namethatplant.org.

Richard Milne, Senior Lecturer in Plant Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Britain appears to be a nation on the verge of Norman-conquest mania. In July, the prime minister and the French president announced that the Bayeux tapestry – the epic 11th-century embroidery that depicts the 1066 conquest of England – would be loaned to the British Museum in 2026-27.

This makes new BBC drama series, King & Conqueror, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest, extremely well timed. The credits of each episode feature the drama’s title overlaid on imagery from the Bayeux tapestry. But how does the drama compare to that most evocative textile account of the conquest?

I could write at length about how the BBC drama variously depicts and diverges from the tapestry’s version of events. And the extent to which King & Conqueror is consistent with 11th-century written and embroidered sources has been explored by historians elsewhere.

As an art historian who has researched the Bayeux tapestry, it is difficult not to regret the relative darkness and lack of colour in King & Conqueror’s depiction of the 11th century, an age which would in reality have been richly furnished, as the tapestry itself attests.

But it is satisfying to see that the narrative devices that are most effective in this new drama are those also included in tapestry. To varying degrees, both the tapestry and the drama are dramatised retellings of history, a reality most obviously signalled by fact that neither tell a perfectly linear account of the events.

In the tapestry sequencing for instance, Edward the Confessor’s funeral is stitched before his death, shocking the viewer with the pomp of a stately funeral before then depicting his deathbed. Similarly, in episode five of King & Conqueror, we see Harold and his wife Edith kidnapped, bound and held in a wagon under attack from archers. Then the chronology leaps backwards to explain that Harold and Edith have travelled on a diplomatic mission to Normandy, landed in Brittany by mistake, and then been taken hostage by bandits.

An unflinching portrayal of the brutality of battle is similarly used in both the BBC drama and the tapestry to maintain suspense, even when the outcome of the Battle of Hastings is well known.

Violence and fear

Blood and gore are dramatically present in King & Conqueror. But arguably, replacing benign patterns of birds and beasts on the margins of the tapestry with mutilated bodies is an even more arresting way to signal the violent disruption to life caused by medieval battle.

The scale of William’s violence off the battlefield is also more fully captured in the tapestry. In the final episode of the drama, William is shown ordering the plundering and burning of every village they pass through: “We move forward like the wrath of God.”

But the fear such an order would have struck in people of all classes is not so explicitly captured as it is in the tapestry, where the battle is preceded by the depiction of an anonymous woman and child fleeing their home as the Normans set it on fire.

In this sense, the tapestry also gives a greater sense of the effect of a conquering army had on ordinary women, than a drama more concerned with the main characters. So much so, that it makes the BBC’s sexed-up trailer shared on social media bewildering.

Suggestive clips of Harold and William are shown with the text: “Want to be served by a king? Or let him conquer you?” Anyone who had viewed the Bayeux tapestry and seen the fate of women portrayed there, would certainly not wish to conquered by William’s forces.

The porousness of the Channel as a well-trodden diplomatic avenue is a similarly effective leitmotif in both the tapestry and the drama. Boats crossing the Channel are a frequent tableau in King & Conqueror, reaching a crescendo in the final episode, in which the scale of the Norman fleet with its sails raised resembles the white cliffs of Dover.

In the tapestry, boat crossings are shown with equal frequency, though the scale of the Norman fleet is even more evocatively captured by the depiction of its construction: men felling trees to make boats for the invading flotilla. A unprecedented number of boats in the tapestry are then seen crossing the Channel, their overlapping prows powerfully conveying the scale of the invading naval force.

History meets contemporary politics

It is here that the Bayeux tapestry, the BBC’s dramatisation, and contemporary politics intersect. On the day that followed the announcement of the Bayeux tapestry’s loan, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron held a joint press conference in which they announced a bilateral policy engineered to respond to the increase in the number of migrants crossing the Channel from France in small boats.

In King & Conqueror, the series ends with William’s coronation. However, the tapestry itself appears incomplete and terminates abruptly after the Battle of Hastings.

The current leaders of France and Britain have explicitly sought to frame their new policy as a continuation of the tapestry’s narrative, with Macron commenting:

The story is unfinished and nobody knows the end … But this is our work, our duty and our chance … to finish the tapestry and … take the same road as these warriors but with another state of mind … that together we will build a new … common history and create a new era based on culture, knowledge, respect, science and centuries of enlightenment, creations, and … friendship.

There is, of course, an irony to promoting Anglo-French bilateralism through an object that depicts the invasion and conquering of England by the Normans in 1066.

But there is also a poignant, unacknowledged paradox in referencing an object that so evocatively depicts boats crossing the Channel as a means of bolstering policies specifically designed to deter them, and the people they carry. Certainly, it is clear that some visual motifs remain as politically affecting today as they did in the 11th century.

Millie Horton-Insch, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, History of Art Department, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Since 1945, three-quarters of all global economic growth has been driven by technological advances. Since 1990, 90% of that advance has been rooted in fundamental science, according to Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University.

Corporate leaders in the United States understood this decades ago when they urged Congress to back “patient capital” for research – because this type of investment creates openings for breakthrough applications.

Think of the building blocks of our modern economy – wifi, smartphones, advanced cancer therapies, drought-tolerant crops and satellite navigation. These began as basic research, often with no obvious immediate application. Then they became the platforms for whole new industries.

But in Australia, we still treat research funding as a discretionary extra, subject to the ebb and flow of political expediency and annual budgets. Despite decades of speeches, reviews and strategic papers, our investment in knowledge creation and its application has nose-dived.

Today, the Australian Academy of Science released a landmark report that systematically measures our science capability against future needs for the first time.

The findings are blunt. We have gaps – in workforce, infrastructure and coordination – that will cripple our ability to secure a bright future for the next generation, unless we act now.

What did the report find?

The new report maps Australia’s scientific capability and shortfalls across three major areas.

Over the next decade, Australia is facing a demographic change with an ageing population, a decreasing fertility rate, and increasing growth in urban and regional cities.

The second national challenge is technological transformation. In most areas of life, we’re experiencing rapid technological changes. This includes advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that are already changing the shape of the workforce.

The third challenge is climate change, decarbonisation and environment. It’s imperative for Australia to transition to a net-zero economy and become resilient against the impacts of climate change.

What do we need to have in place for Australia to meet these challenges by 2035? Two key factors are science literacy and education, and national resilience. In a world of fractured geopolitics and technological competition, the countries that will thrive are those that can generate and apply knowledge for their own needs, in their own context.

The report has found eight key science areas that will be most in demand by 2035: agricultural science, AI, biotechnology, climate science, data science, epidemiology, geoscience and materials science.

For each of these, the report contains a full dashboard that shows gaps in capabilities – from education to workforce needs, research and development spending, publications and more.

Still not innovative enough

Since 2008, Australia’s spending on research and development as a proportion of gross domestic product has fallen so far behind the OECD average, it would take an extra A$28 billion a year just to reach parity.

In his election speech in 1990, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke issued a warning: being the lucky country was not enough, we had to become a clever country, too.

Today, 35 years on, Hawke’s vision of the clever country remains just that – a vision. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull tried to rekindle the impetus in 2015 with “the innovation nation”. However, this year Treasurer Jim Chalmers conceded our economy is still “not dynamic or innovative enough”.

The vast majority of global climate and earth system models have been developed in the northern hemisphere, and we need more work to understand Australian conditions as well as the Southern Ocean.

Our AI capacity is hostage to developments offshore. We import more than we invent in biotechnology, advanced manufacturing and clean energy.

These are not merely academic concerns – they are constraints on our sovereignty, resilience and competitiveness.

We need a ‘reservoir of talent’

But scientific capability is not something you can simply conjure up on a whim. You need a “reservoir of talent”, infrastructure and knowledge that takes decades to build.

Developing a climate scientist, a quantum physicist, or a vaccine researcher takes long-term investment in education, facilities and research programs. Abandoning or under-funding these pipelines for even a few years creates gaps. Knowledge can’t just flow when the tap is turned on if the reservoir is dry.

Today’s report shows the current pipeline and study choices of students don’t match the needs of Australia’s future workforce.

For example, in 2023 only 25.2% of students with a Year 12 qualification studied mathematics to at least intermediate level. Yet it’s a fundamental science discipline for AI.

Similarly, our economy relies heavily on resources and critical minerals, yet Australia isn’t training enough geoscientists.

It’s time for a whole-of-government science strategy, embedded in economic, education, defence and industry policy. The government should use the evidence in this report to address capability gaps and direct resources strategically to better position Australia for the next ten years and beyond.

Thirty-five years after Hawke’s challenge, it’s never been clearer: if we don’t act now, our luck will run out.

Chennupati Jagadish, President of the Australian Academy of Science and Emeritus Professor of Physics and Electronic Materials Engineering, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The introduction of television in Australia in 1956 coincided with mass post-war immigration, initially from Britain and Europe, and later from Asia, the Americas and Africa. Both played a significant role in forming modern society.

Our new book, Migrants, Television and Australian Stories, explores this intertwined history across seven decades, through dozens of interviews with screen creatives, technical staff and migrant viewers.

We provide fresh insight into the ways television introduced migrant audiences to the “Australian way of life”, as well as how the screen industry responded to a need for cultural diversity and inclusion.

Migrants were active audiences

Migrants arriving in Australia after the second world war were keen television viewers, despite the relatively high cost of owning a set.

Vietnamese refugee Cuc Lam told us she purchased a bulky secondhand television from a charity shop soon after arriving in Melbourne in 1978. She watched shows such as Play School (1966–) with her young children, picking up English phrases in the process.

The arrival of SBS television in 1980 (a service dedicated to migrant communities) is often heralded as a landmark initiative in Australian multiculturalism.

However, several earlier music and variety program aimed to showcase migrant groups and “exotic” international entertainers. Some examples included ABC’s Café Continental (1958–61) and Latin Holiday (1961).

One 1957 episode of the childrens’ show Romper Room (1953–94) featured insights into Chinese culture (pictured in the header image). This was unfamiliar viewing for most Australians at the time.

From the late 1960s, canny entrepreneurs with links to international diasporas produced shows such as the long-running Variety Italian Style (1972–87).

This commercial program featured music, cooking, travel, sport and documentary segments. It was sold to stations in North America and Europe, where it was broadcast to other Italian migrant populations.

Another such show was the Greek Variety Show (1977–84) produced by Greek Cypriot actor Harry Michaels, who also made the internationally successful Aerobics Oz Style (1982–2005). Michaels told us:

I was selling Greece to Australians, and then I ended up selling Australia to the world.

Representation on- and off-screen

Historically, many Australian-made dramas, comedies and other programs have reduced immigrants and other cultures to crude stereotypes.

In the gritty crime dramas Homicide (1964–77) and Division 4 (1969–75), migrant characters were often portrayed as criminals or victims of crime.

This trend started to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Children of migrants began making their own successful shows that asserted their cultural identities. For example, Acropolis Now (1989–92) centred on the multicultural staff working at a Greek cafe in Melbourne.

Pauline Chan, a refugee of Vietnamese and Chinese backgrounds, worked on the landmark 1986 miniseries Vietnam, which explored the impact of the Vietnam War on a white Australian family.

Despite having worked in Hong Kong’s fast-paced film industry, she struggled to find work after arriving in Australia in 1982. Initially employed on Vietnam as a researcher, the production team quickly realised the value of Chan’s personal expertise. She ended up consulting, acting and working with Vietnamese extras. She said the project “was like going back into the past […] it was a very emotional experience for me”.

Viewing as a family ritual

Jasmina Pandevski, a Macedonian Australian from Wollongong, told us watching Hey Hey It’s Saturday (1971–99) in the early 1980s was a “bit of an event” for her family. Her father would make rice pudding as a special dessert to eat during the show.

World Championship Wrestling (1964–78) was also popular with viewers during its run on Channel 9. It routinely pitted overseas wrestlers against local stars.

Libnan Ayoub, the son of Lebanese migrant wrestler “Sheik” Wadi Ayoub, went as far as to describe it as Australia’s “first multicultural sport”.

Family viewing changed with the arrival of the video recorder. Tala Jovanovski said her parents would source Macedonian videos of dance concerts and films from a neighbourhood shop. While they watched these videos in one room, she and her siblings were more likely watching Home and Away or Neighbours in another, eager to engage with Australian customs and teen culture.

Three siblings of Malaysian–Chinese background told us their conventional Australian children’s television diet was widened by their parents ownership of a video rental store in Brisbane. This meant they would also watch Jackie Chan’s kung-fu films. Now, they enjoy a new ritual of watching Eurovision with their own families.

We found today’s children and young adults of migrant backgrounds prefer the diversity of streaming platforms over commercial television. This corresponds with a wider trend of a preference for streaming.

Inclusion is an ongoing issue

Since the 1980s, a plethora of studies, surveys, forums and reports by media bodies, academics and advocates have suggested Australian broadcast media has been hesitant at best, and racist at worst, in representing cultural difference across scripted and unscripted television.

One 1990 report for the Office of Multicultural Affairs found “mainstream Australian media are neither competent in nor capable of accurately reflecting the diversity of Australian society”.

The situation has improved with gradual gains in access and opportunity for people from diverse backgrounds, along with significant policy changes – but only somewhat.

Actions to ensure diversity in Australian television remain ongoing. Some media creators use humour to critique the process of these well-meaning yet tokenistic efforts for inclusion.

Pearl Tan’s award-winning 2023 podcast Diversity Work, for instance, explores a fictional television writers’ room trying to tick off all its diversity “boxes”.

Tai Hara’s 2020 web series Colour Blind focuses on a hapless white casting agent navigating cultural sensitivities in the modern Australian screen industry.

Our research demonstrates migrants have always been important in producing and watching television. It also traces the continuing complexities of the question: what makes an Australian story?

Kate Darian-Smith, Professorial Fellow in History, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne; Kyle Harvey, Research Fellow, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University; Sue Turnbull, Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong, and Sukhmani Khorana, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gee I am lonely sweetheart, it may sound silly having so many men and cobbers around me, but when I say lonely I don’t mean lack of company, I am lonely for you, only you can fill the gap in my heart dearest, as each moment passes I seem to miss you and love you more, I shall never get used to living without you […] in fact I am sure we were meant to be together all the time.

My great-grandfather Bill Wiseman wrote this to my great-grandmother Florence in a letter dated October 20 1944.

Aside from when Bill briefly returned on leave from his service for the 2/48 Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), he had been separated from Florence since September 1941. Bill would not permanently return to Florence and their children until his discharge from the military on November 8 1945.

It was a long time to be away from his family, and Bill often reflected on the emotional toll their separation had on him.

Loneliness is a common emotion in letters written by Australian service personnel and their loved ones. Rather than a complete physical isolation from others, this situational loneliness was characterised by the absence of a certain person: one’s partner, parents or children.

As Bill acknowledged, while he was surrounded by “cobbers”, it was Florence who he was “lonely for”.

Separations over oceans

Like other historical events that caused mass displacement and separation, the second world war fostered an almost universal sense of situational loneliness.

Emotional experiences and expressions were often dictated by real physical distance. Methods of travel and communication were significantly limited. It could take months for a letter to reach its destination.

Other circumstances influenced how separated families felt and articulated their loneliness in wartime. This could include factors such as how long they had been apart, whether personnel could return home on leave, the intensity of military campaigns which might restrict mail exchanges, and if personnel were injured or captured by enemy forces.

While letters could never completely substitute for the absent person, Australian military personnel and their loved ones recognised the importance of exchanging correspondence to ease their loneliness.

AIF Sergeant Robert Graham implored his fiancée Jane Melrose to write more regularly, as it improved his morale:

I received your ever welcomed and much needed letter yesterday and it made me feel a lot better + miles happier too. Jane whatever you do pleased write as often as you can […] I feel so depressed when mail comes in and I don’t get any from you. It doesn’t matter who I get mail from I’m still not happy unless I recognise your handwriting on the envelope.

Barbara Welbourn, a soil scientist at the University of Adelaide, wrote to her fiancé, Sergeant David Sheppard, about the “renewal” his letters provided when she was lonely:

Your [76th letter] was waiting for me last night; such a blessed end to the day + so longed for […] I am so dependent, my sweet David on your love, its constant renewal, even more wonderful by letters that I will be adrift in sad seas without them.

Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force Aircraftwoman Doris Plummer wrote she was “dying” for news from her husband Private Walter Plummer, who served in the Volunteer Defence Corps.

She wanted to hear about his Christmas, because as it would make her feel closer their family:

Hope you tell me everyone you saw everything you said and did. How many fish you caught, how many times you swam and missing no details. They are the little unimportant things that make me feel I am not so far away.

Patience and perseverance

While loneliness was (and still often is) perceived as a negative emotion, characterised by mental pain and absence, letter writers from the war often discussed how experiencing these uncomfortable feelings ultimately transformed their relationships for the better.

Albert Gerrard, a private in the Australian Army Medical Corps, assured Margaret James that he believed separation ultimately prepared them for marriage:

Three years have not been wasted, I think we’ve both learned a lot. I have anyway, patience, perseverance, and over + above all else, what a loyal little darling you are. It has also knocked a lot of conceit + selfishness out of me. Generally speaking, I’m better for it.

Lance Corporal George Seagrove outlined how he believed the longing he felt for his wife Marjorie made him appreciate the joy she brought him.

In one such letter, George wrote:

This parting, more than anything else, has made me realise how big you have been in my life […] It’s like a soul split in two. When I see anything I always want to rush to my pen and tell you about it. If it is something funny I can hear you laughing because I know you laugh at the same things as I do […] Every day when the mail comes my heart beats a little bit quicker and your familiar handwriting brings a big smile to my face.

Letter writers on the home and battle fronts showed a great capacity to express vulnerability by describing their loneliness.

Through their heartache and anxiety about the uncertainty of their futures, separated spouses realised their love for one another was undeniable.

Emma Carson, Historian of Emotions and Australian Society, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The brain has its own waste disposal system – known as the glymphatic system – that’s thought to be more active when we sleep.

But disrupted sleep might hinder this waste disposal system and slow the clearance of waste products or toxins from the brain. And researchers are proposing a build-up of these toxins due to lost sleep could increase someone’s risk of dementia.

There is still some debate about how this glymphatic system works in humans, with most research so far in mice.

But it raises the possibility that better sleep might boost clearance of these toxins from the human brain and so reduce the risk of dementia.

Here’s what we know so far about this emerging area of research.

Why waste matters

All cells in the body create waste. Outside the brain, the lymphatic system carries this waste from the spaces between cells to the blood via a network of lymphatic vessels.

But the brain has no lymphatic vessels. And until about 12 years ago, how the brain clears its waste was a mystery. That’s when scientists discovered the “glymphatic system” and described how it “flushes out” brain toxins.

Let’s start with cerebrospinal fluid, the fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. This fluid flows in the areas surrounding the brain’s blood vessels. It then enters the spaces between the brain cells, collecting waste, then carries it out of the brain via large draining veins.

Scientists then showed in mice that this glymphatic system was most active – with increased flushing of waste products – during sleep.

One such waste product is amyloid beta (Aβ) protein. Aβ that accumulates in the brain can form clumps called plaques. These, along with tangles of tau protein found in neurons (brain cells), are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia.

In humans and mice, studies have shown that levels of Aβ detected in the cerebrospinal fluid increase when awake and then rapidly fall during sleep.

But more recently, another study (in mice) showed pretty much the opposite – suggesting the glymphatic system is more active in the daytime. Researchers are debating what might explain the findings.

So we still have some way to go before we can say exactly how the glymphatic system works – in mice or humans – to clear the brain of toxins that might otherwise increase the risk of dementia.

Does this happen in humans too?

We know sleeping well is good for us, particularly our brain health. We are all aware of the short-term effects of sleep deprivation on our brain’s ability to function, and we know sleep helps improve memory.

In one experiment, a single night of complete sleep deprivation in healthy adults increased the amount of Aβ in the hippocampus, an area of the brain implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. This suggests sleep can influence the clearance of Aβ from the human brain, supporting the idea that the human glymphatic system is more active while we sleep.

This also raises the question of whether good sleep might lead to better clearance of toxins such as Aβ from the brain, and so be a potential target to prevent dementia.

How about sleep apnoea or insomnia?

What is less clear is what long-term disrupted sleep, for instance if someone has a sleep disorder, means for the body’s ability to clear Aβ from the brain.

Sleep apnoea is a common sleep disorder when someone’s breathing stops multiple times as they sleep. This can lead to chronic (long-term) sleep deprivation, and reduced oxygen in the blood. Both may be implicated in the accumulation of toxins in the brain.

Sleep apnoea has also been linked with an increased risk of dementia. And we now know that after people are treated for sleep apnoea more Aβ is cleared from the brain.

Insomnia is when someone has difficulty falling asleep and/or staying asleep. When this happens in the long term, there’s also an increased risk of dementia. However, we don’t know the effect of treating insomnia on toxins associated with dementia.

So again, it’s still too early to say for sure that treating a sleep disorder reduces your risk of dementia because of reduced levels of toxins in the brain.

So where does this leave us?

Collectively, these studies suggest enough good quality sleep is important for a healthy brain, and in particular for clearing toxins associated with dementia from the brain.

But we still don’t know if treating a sleep disorder or improving sleep more broadly affects the brain’s ability to remove toxins, and whether this reduces the risk of dementia. It’s an area researchers, including us, are actively working on.

For instance, we’re investigating the concentration of Aβ and tau measured in blood across the 24-hour sleep-wake cycle in people with sleep apnoea, on and off treatment, to better understand how sleep apnoea affects brain cleaning.

Researchers are also looking into the potential for treating insomnia with a class of drugs known as orexin receptor antagonists to see if this affects the clearance of Aβ from the brain.

If you’re concerned

This is an emerging field and we don’t yet have all the answers about the link between disrupted sleep and dementia, or whether better sleep can boost the glymphatic system and so prevent cognitive decline.

So if you are concerned about your sleep or cognition, please see your doctor.

Julia Chapman, Clinical Trials Lead and Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and Conjoint Lecturer, Macquarie University; Camilla Hoyos, Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Sleep and Chronobiology, Macquarie University, and Craig Phillips, Associate Professor, Macquarie Medical School, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The federal government has reached a $475 million compensation settlement in an appeal case from the Robodebt class action.

The settlement of the appeal, which is still to be approved by the federal court, would be the largest class action settlement in Australian history.

It is for compensation for the harm caused by the Robodebt scheme, which was found to have been illegal. The scheme and the ministers and public servants involved in it were strongly condemned by a royal commission set up by the Labor government. Robodebt ran between 2015 and 2019.

The scheme involved using automated processes for levying debts, many of which were non-existent or calculated wrongly. The scheme traumatised thousands of welfare recipients.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland, said the settlement would be in addition to what was paid after the original Robodebt case action settlement in 2020. That comprised interest and repayments of wrongfully-raised debts. It amounted to a $1.2 billion payout.

The latest agreement also allows the court to determine separate amounts for the applicants’ “reasonable legal costs” and for the reasonable costs of administering the settlement scheme.

Rowland said, “Today’s settlement demonstrates the Albanese Labor government’s ongoing commitment to addressing the harms caused to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians by the former Liberal government’s disastrous Robodebt Scheme”.

“The Royal Commission described Robodebt as a ‘crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal’. It found that ‘people were traumatised on the off chance they might owe money’ and that Robodebt was ‘a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms’.

"Settling this claim is the just and fair thing to do,” Rowland said.

She said class action members did not have to take any action at this stage other than ensure their contact details were up to date with Services Australia.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gee I am lonely sweetheart, it may sound silly having so many men and cobbers around me, but when I say lonely I don’t mean lack of company, I am lonely for you, only you can fill the gap in my heart dearest, as each moment passes I seem to miss you and love you more, I shall never get used to living without you […] in fact I am sure we were meant to be together all the time.

My great-grandfather Bill Wiseman wrote this to my great-grandmother Florence in a letter dated October 20 1944.

Aside from when Bill briefly returned on leave from his service for the 2/48 Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), he had been separated from Florence since September 1941. Bill would not permanently return to Florence and their children until his discharge from the military on November 8 1945.

It was a long time to be away from his family, and Bill often reflected on the emotional toll their separation had on him.

Loneliness is a common emotion in letters written by Australian service personnel and their loved ones. Rather than a complete physical isolation from others, this situational loneliness was characterised by the absence of a certain person: one’s partner, parents or children.

As Bill acknowledged, while he was surrounded by “cobbers”, it was Florence who he was “lonely for”.

Separations over oceans

Like other historical events that caused mass displacement and separation, the second world war fostered an almost universal sense of situational loneliness.

Emotional experiences and expressions were often dictated by real physical distance. Methods of travel and communication were significantly limited. It could take months for a letter to reach its destination.

Other circumstances influenced how separated families felt and articulated their loneliness in wartime. This could include factors such as how long they had been apart, whether personnel could return home on leave, the intensity of military campaigns which might restrict mail exchanges, and if personnel were injured or captured by enemy forces.

While letters could never completely substitute for the absent person, Australian military personnel and their loved ones recognised the importance of exchanging correspondence to ease their loneliness.

AIF Sergeant Robert Graham implored his fiancée Jane Melrose to write more regularly, as it improved his morale:

I received your ever welcomed and much needed letter yesterday and it made me feel a lot better + miles happier too. Jane whatever you do pleased write as often as you can […] I feel so depressed when mail comes in and I don’t get any from you. It doesn’t matter who I get mail from I’m still not happy unless I recognise your handwriting on the envelope.

Barbara Welbourn, a soil scientist at the University of Adelaide, wrote to her fiancé, Sergeant David Sheppard, about the “renewal” his letters provided when she was lonely:

Your [76th letter] was waiting for me last night; such a blessed end to the day + so longed for […] I am so dependent, my sweet David on your love, its constant renewal, even more wonderful by letters that I will be adrift in sad seas without them.

Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force Aircraftwoman Doris Plummer wrote she was “dying” for news from her husband Private Walter Plummer, who served in the Volunteer Defence Corps.

She wanted to hear about his Christmas, because as it would make her feel closer their family:

Hope you tell me everyone you saw everything you said and did. How many fish you caught, how many times you swam and missing no details. They are the little unimportant things that make me feel I am not so far away.

Patience and perseverance

While loneliness was (and still often is) perceived as a negative emotion, characterised by mental pain and absence, letter writers from the war often discussed how experiencing these uncomfortable feelings ultimately transformed their relationships for the better.

Albert Gerrard, a private in the Australian Army Medical Corps, assured Margaret James that he believed separation ultimately prepared them for marriage:

Three years have not been wasted, I think we’ve both learned a lot. I have anyway, patience, perseverance, and over + above all else, what a loyal little darling you are. It has also knocked a lot of conceit + selfishness out of me. Generally speaking, I’m better for it.

Lance Corporal George Seagrove outlined how he believed the longing he felt for his wife Marjorie made him appreciate the joy she brought him.

In one such letter, George wrote:

This parting, more than anything else, has made me realise how big you have been in my life […] It’s like a soul split in two. When I see anything I always want to rush to my pen and tell you about it. If it is something funny I can hear you laughing because I know you laugh at the same things as I do […] Every day when the mail comes my heart beats a little bit quicker and your familiar handwriting brings a big smile to my face.

Letter writers on the home and battle fronts showed a great capacity to express vulnerability by describing their loneliness.

Through their heartache and anxiety about the uncertainty of their futures, separated spouses realised their love for one another was undeniable.

Emma Carson, Historian of Emotions and Australian Society, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Albanese government has announced 20,000 home care packages will be brought forward to be delivered before the end of October – immediately after opposing doing so in the Senate.

The Coalition, Greens and crossbenchers passed an amendment to aged care legislation moved by ACT independent David Pocock.

The vote went through without a division, but the government recorded its opposition.

The new Minister for Aged Care and Seniors, Sam Rae, had been under pressure in the House of Representatives this week over the huge waiting lists for packages, a position made worse by the delay of the implementation of the new aged care system from July to November.

According to the latest figures, there are 121,000 people waiting to be assessed, and nearly 109,000 waiting for packages. The government admitted to the latter figure in the Senate on Wednesday.

Minister for Ageing Mark Butler announced soon after the Senate vote that there would be 20,000 home care packages brought forward for release between now and the end of October, after which the new aged care system starts.

Between November 1 and December 31, 20,000 packages would be put into the system, he said. In the first six months of next year, the remaining 43,000 packages would be rolled out.

Butler said this reflected “an agreed position” between the government and the Liberals, “the two parties of government”. He said there would be some additional cost in bringing the rollout forward.

He flagged this cleared the way for the government’s legislation to get through the Senate this week.

The opposition said Rae had repeatedly claimed the figure was “around 87,000 people waiting” at the end of March, rather than providing the updated figure.

Oppositon leader Sussan Ley and aged care spokeswoman Anne Ruston said in a statement, “Labor promised 83,000 new packages from 1 July 2025, but instead decided to withhold support – despite the sector and the Department being ready to deliver them. Because of Labor’s delays not a single new home care package has been released this financial year.

"As a result, the priority waitlist has blown out to more than 108,000, a 400% increase in just two years, whilst wait times have tripled.”

Pocock said: “The government should have never delayed these additional Home Care packages. My amendment to release additional packages got support in the Senate today despite the Aged Care Minister’s opposition.

"Now the Health Minister has stepped in and announced the government will release the 20,000 additional home care packages the crossbench has been calling for since June.

"This is a huge win for community advocacy and will make a huge difference to older Australians but there is still so much more to do.”

The opposition said Rae was excluded from the government-opposition negotiation over the changed arrangements.

Asked at question time why he had not given the updated 109,000 number to the House of Representatives, Rae pointed to a longstainding process of verification.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After 85 years of continuous publication, Meanjin, Australia’s second-oldest literary journal, is closing. Editor Esther Anatolitis and deputy editor Eli McLean have been made redundant and the final issue will appear in December. Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), which has housed the magazine since 2007, has cited “purely financial grounds” for the decision.

The closure has been roundly condemned by writers across Australia, including Jennifer Mills, Anna Krien, Claire G. Coleman and Sian Prior, along with former editors including Sophie Cunningham, Jonathan Green and Sally Heath.

“The loss of Meanjin is devastating news for Australian writers and readers,” Mills, a Miles Franklin shortlisted author, wrote on Bluesky. “Always meant so much to see my work there. Some of my best experiences of being edited.”

Award-winning writer Anna Krien told The Conversation:

As an outsider, clearly I don’t have a detailed script of what went on behind closed doors – but the public statement that this turn of events is a financial decision is laughable. I highly doubt Meanjin, in its entire 85 years, has ever made money.

Krien said Meanjin was “a literary journal for emerging and established writers to practise and experiment with form and craft, to say the unsayable and yes, the trite as well. Its very existence was an expression of valuing critical and creative endeavour in literary form.”

“Disgusted” Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman, writing on Bluesky, called Meanjin’s closure “cultural vandalism of the highest order”; she pointed out the journal is older than the Sydney Opera House.

Founded in Brisbane in December 1940 by Clem Christesen, Meanjin is not just a magazine, but an important cultural institution whose pages recorded and provoked national conversation and debate for the best part of a century.

In 1945, the journal moved to Melbourne at the invitation of the University of Melbourne, where it found stability and national reach. For decades, Meanjin has provided one of the most vital stages for fresh new forms of Australian writing and cultural commentary.

Its issues have featured work by major Australian writers, including Helen Garner, Alexis Wright, David Malouf, Judith Wright, Patrick White and A.A. Philips, whose 1950 essay on the topic of “cultural cringe” gave a generation of readers an enduring name for the unease of colonial self-doubt.

In a statement, MUP chair Warren Bebbington said the board “found it no longer viable to produce the magazine ongoing”. He said “the two part-time staff of Meanjin were not involved in the decision”.

Crikey quoted from an internal email sent to staff by MUP chief executive and publisher Foong Ling Kong, which said in part, “the decision was not made lightly”. “The financial pressures of publishing a literary magazine in today’s world, however, are inescapable and considerable, and the readership is shrinking.”

Louise Adler, chief executive of MUP when Meanjin was placed under its administration, told Crikey:

Given the coffers of the University of Melbourne, one would have thought the paltry amount Meanjin requires on a yearly basis was small coin for the intellectual contribution the magazine, at its best, can make to our literary culture.

Former Meanjin editor Sally Heath, now a nonfiction publisher at Allen & Unwin, told The Conversation the journal should be recognised “as a valuable part of the University of Melbourne’s cultural portfolio, alongside the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Ian Potter Museum”.

When creative writing and publishing courses are booming and Australian Studies under threat, the merit of such an independent magazine should be celebrated and seen as an important part of the reading and writing landscape.

Why was Meanjin so important?

Meanjin’s name derives from the Yuggera word for the land on which Brisbane now stands. From the outset, Meanjin was conceived as a forum for serious literary debate and as a conduit for cultural engagement. To read through Meanjin’s archive is to trace the evolution of modern and contemporary Australian intellectual life.

Across its lifespan, the journal was also, notably, a platform for First Nations authors. Wiradjuri writer and editor Jeanine Leane was appointed poetry editor in 2023 and the magazine has published the work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Tony Birch and Ellen van Neerven – who has an essay planned for the final edition.

Publishing researcher Alice Grundy, managing editor of Australia Institute Press, likens the reason given for the closure to “measuring the success of aged care on how much revenue it generates for the economy”. Literary journals, she told The Conversation, are “key cultural infrastructure”.

So many Australian books have grown from essays or stories in literary journals. Sian Prior is one of those authors: her 2014 debut book, Shy: A Memoir, began life as a personal essay in Meanjin. “I am deeply upset and disappointed that the publishing company of my alma mater, Melbourne University, has failed to recognise and secure the vital role of Meanjin in the fragile and eternally under-resourced Australian literary ecosystem,” she told The Conversation.

Editors who work on journals such as these can develop their careers and financially support their writing through those jobs.

“Our literary magazines are facing attacks on multiple fronts, a "deeply shocked” Stephanie Holt, Meanjin editor from 1998 to 2001, told The Conversation. “That they keep going at all is often down to goodwill and unpaid or underpaid labour on the part of so many.”

As we grapple with the impact of AI on our reading, writing and thinking, they offer the important prospect of a trusted forum for the thoughtful, singular and defiant voices we are in danger of losing.

Cunningham told Crikey Meanjin’s closure “reinforces my sense that universities are no longer spaces that support or nurture literature or the arts in this country”. In the last several years, she said, universities have “shown themselves unable to manage robust debates or the complexities of freedom of speech.”

‘Managed destruction’

Last year, Tom Doig, author of a book on the Hazelwood mine fire disaster, won the Hilary McPhee Award for his Meanjin essay revisiting the disaster a decade later. He, too, questioned the reason for Meanjin’s closure. “Almost no literary journals” make money, he pointed out – and nor are they expected to.

Emmett Stinson, senior lecturer in creative Writing at Edith Cowan University, told The Conversation the news is “highly distressing”.

If the most prestigious university in Australia will not fund our most prestigious literary journal, then it makes you question whether or not universities actually care about Australian culture.

The timing of Meanjin’s closure comes on the heels of Writing Australia’s July launch, with considerable fanfare and significant funding: more than A$26 million over three years, plus ongoing annual support and the appointment of Australia’s first National Poet Laureate.

The coexistence of these two developments – a state-sponsored national literary initiative on the one hand, the managed destruction of a historic literary periodical on the other – invites a difficult, if necessary question.

If Writing Australia is to truly support and promote the sector (to borrow its official phrasing), what does it say about our literary culture when one of the sector’s most venerable organs is simultaneously allowed to vanish?

One wonders how, in the years to come, the sudden winding down of the journal will be remembered – as a minor footnote, or a revealing commentary on what the very idea of “supporting literature” has come to mean?

Meanjin was, in part, about “articulating the Australian cultural moment” and ensuring Australia could speak to itself – critically, insistently, sometimes uncomfortably. Its closure raises the question of whether we – as a society – are still interested in hearing that voice.

At this moment in Australian life, is cutting-edge literature more welcome in practice than in principle?

Once the final issue of Meanjin has been published in December, a lively 85-year thread of our cultural conversation will fall silent. Whether that disquieting hush says more about our universities, our elected officials or ourselves is something all Australians will have to decide.

Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A year ago, Google faced the prospect of being dismantled. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and a new court judgment has helped it avoid this fate. Part of the reason is that AI poses a grave threat to Google’s advertising revenues.

“Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,” according to the decision.

Google must share certain data with “qualified competitors” as deemed by the court. This will include parts of its search index, Google’s inventory of web content. Judge Mehta will allow Google to continue paying companies like Apple and Samsung to distribute of its search engine on devices and browsers. But he will bar Google from maintaining exclusive contracts.

The history of this decision goes back to a 2024 ruling by federal judge Amit Mehta. It found that Google maintained a monopoly in the search engine market, notably by paying billions to companies including Apple and Samsung to set Google as the default search engine on their devices.

Almost a year later, the same US judge issued his final ruling, and the tone could not be more different. Google will not be broken up. There will be no choice screen on new phones.

The nature of the search engine market, where more users generate more data, and more data improves search quality, made it impossible for competitors to challenge Google, the court found in 2024.

The 2024 ruling itself was controversial. While high quality data enables a dominant firm to extract more profit from consumers, it also allows it to provide a better service. Decades of research in economics has shown that determining which effect is more important is not straightforward.

At the time, the US Department of Justice deemed the issue so serious that it considered breaking up Google as the only viable solution. For instance, it suggested forcing the company to sell its web browser, Google Chrome.

The government also proposed forcing device manufacturers to offer users a choice of search engines during set up, and compelling Google to share most of its data on user behaviour and ad bidding, where advertisers compete in auctions to get their ads shown to users for a specific search query or audience. These so-called “remedies”, measures Google would be required to implement to end its monopoly, aimed to restore competition.

Limited sharing

So, what has changed in a year to so radically change the perception of Google’s market dominance? The main answer is AI – and specifically, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s own Gemini. As users increasingly turn to LLMs for web searches, Google responded by placing AI-generated summaries at the top of its search results.

The way people navigate the internet is quickly evolving, with one trend reshaping the business models of online companies: the zero click search. According to a Bain & Company survey, consumers now default to accepting AI-generated answers without further interaction. The data is striking: 80% of users report being satisfied with AI responses for at least 40% of their searches, often stopping at the summary page.

Threat to ad revenue

This AI-driven shift in consumer behaviour threatens not only Google’s business model but also that of most internet based companies. Advertising accounts for roughly 80% of Google’s revenue, earned by charging companies for prominent placement in search results and by leveraging its vast amount of user data to sell ad space across the web. If users stop clicking links, this revenue stream evaporates.

More importantly for this ruling, the market Google once monopolised may no longer be the relevant one. Today, Google’s primary potential competitors in search are not Microsoft Bing, but AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. In the global race for AI dominance, the outcome is far from certain.

From an antitrust standpoint, there is little justification for penalising Google now or forcing it to cede advantages to competitors. What would be the benefit for consumers of forcing Google to accept the £24.6 billion offer from Jeff Bezos’ Perplexity AI to buy the Chrome browser?

In essence, the judge acknowledges that Google monopolised the search engine market for a decade but concludes that the issue may resolve itself in the years ahead.

This situation echoes the first major monopolisation case: Internet Explorer. For years, European and US regulators battled Microsoft to dismantle the dominance of its web browser, which was bundled with the then-dominant Windows 95 operating system.

By the time all appeals were exhausted, however, the monopoly had vanished. Internet Explorer was partly a victim of the rise of smartphones, which did not rely on Windows. The new king in town was a newcomer: a certain Google Chrome.

How you view the economic and political power of tech giants will shape which lesson you draw from this story. An optimistic view I suggested (with the economist Jana Friedrichsen) is that winner-takes-all markets can intensify competition through innovation. In such markets, incremental investment is not enough; to challenge Google, a competitor must offer a vastly superior product to capture the entire market.

Precisely because they ruthlessly defend their monopoly positions, tech giants show competitors that the potential gains from radical innovations are massive. The pessimistic view, however, is that years of dominance have left these firms largely unaccountable, which could embolden them in future.

Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If there was any doubt about neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell’s racist and anti-democratic attitudes, they were dispelled on the morning of September 2 when he gatecrashed a press conference by Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and Treasurer Jaclyn Symes. In disrupting the conference, Sewell yelled that Australians did not have the right to protest and made the false claim that 50,000 protesters attended the “March for Australia” rally in Melbourne over the weekend.

The press conference was abandoned and Allan subsequently put out a statement saying she was unharmed and undeterred. She added:

But this isn’t about me. It’s about all the other people in the community who Nazis target – like multicultural people, LGBTIQA+ people, First Peoples, and Jews.

The symbolism of Sewell’s actions went well beyond the disruption of a press conference. It was an attempt to insert a neo-Nazi presence into the democratic process, and served to underline what was really behind the weekend’s events.

Media misjudgments

There were omissions and misjudgments in the media’s coverage of last weekend’s so-called anti-immigration rallies in eight Australian capital cities, leaving an unintentionally sanitised account of what occurred.

The main misjudgment was to persist in using the organisers’ description of the rallies as “March for Australia” and “anti-immigration” after it had become obvious the emotional dynamo behind them was racism.

It is true that they were in part anti-immigration, and it was clear from the coverage that some, perhaps most, people joined in because they were genuinely opposed to immigration for reasons not connected with race, but to do with issues such as housing.

But the fact is that the leadership of the Melbourne rally was provided by the National Socialist Network, a neo-Nazi organisation, and it became clear as events unfolded, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, that the terms “anti-immigration” and “March for Australia” were merely a smokescreen.

It became even clearer when a phalanx of neo-Nazis attacked an Indigenous protest site called Camp Sovereignty in Kings Domain, Melbourne. That had nothing to do with immigration: it was all about racism.

It also became clear when the main speaker at the Melbourne rally was Sewell. As The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Bachelard reported:

[…] to the extent there was any sign of organisation among the grab-bag of grievances ranging over the streets of Melbourne’s CBD, it was the National Socialist Network that provided it.

It was a similar story in Sydney, where Joel Davis, a leader in the National Socialist Network who has openly praised Adolf Hitler, addressed the rally there.

However, by adopting the ambiguous title “March for Australia” and claiming a focus on immigration, the organisers masked the racist impulse driving them. Racism is a defining characteristic of Nazism. The neo-Nazis took a leading role. It follows that these were primarily racist rallies.

There were sound reasons for the media to suspect their true nature, reasons grounded in good reporting prior to the event.

On August 29, the Sydney Morning Herald published a story seeking to establish who was behind them. A Facebook group had popped up on August 9, but when the Herald asked who was behind it, a spokesperson who would not be identified said there was no “overall organiser” but “a number of people” providing logistical and social media support.

Evasive, yes, but the racist nature of the enterprise was clear.

The Herald also reported that “Bec Freedom”, the online pseudonym for a woman who claimed to have lodged the protest application form with NSW Police, was heard on a livestream on August 11 instructing march promoters to use messaging about protecting Australian heritage, which she said meant “white heritage”.

That is racist by definition. The organisers, whose unwillingness to be identified should have added to the suspicion, disclaimed connections with the National Socialist Network. So they now have to explain how it was that the neo-Nazis took over the Melbourne rally and provided principal speakers both there and in Sydney.

Moreover, the organisers drew on the rhetoric of the “great replacement theory” in a flyer that singled out Indian immigrants, claiming that the reason for increased Indian migration to Australia is “replacement, plain and simple”.

This theory asserts that some Western elites are conspiring to replace white Americans and Europeans with people of non-European descent, particularly Asians and Africans.

It was invoked by the Australian white-supremacist terrorist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who massacred 51 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch in 2019, and by Anders Breivik, who massacred 69 young people in Norway in 2011.

The failure to draw attention to this connection was another omission in the coverage of the weekend’s violence.

And a third was the failure to point out the contrast between the scale and orderliness of the huge pro-Palestine marches of August 3 2025, which attracted largely peaceful crowds estimated at 100,000 in Sydney and 25,000 in Melbourne, compared with the disorder generated by crowds estimated 15,000 in Sydney and 9,000, including 3,000 counter-protesters, in Melbourne last weekend.

Calling the rallies for what they are

Having said that, the focus of last weekend’s news coverage was rightly on what happened on the streets, and in that respect the coverage was comprehensive and, so far as it was possible to tell, accurate and impartial. The language used was proportional to the events and properly focused on the violence, which was a clear and present danger to public safety.

However, the way the media name things matters, and in this respect there was enough evidence to call the rallies for what they were, rather than what the evasive and shadowy organisers said they were.

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cyber crime group ShinyHunters has received global attention after Google urged 2.5 billion users to tighten their security following a data breach via Salesforce, a customer management platform.

Unlike data breaches where hackers directly break into databases holding valuable information, ShinyHunters – and several other groups – have recently targeted major companies through voice-based social engineering (also known as “vishing”, short for voice phishing).

Social engineering is when a person is tricked or manipulated into providing information or performing actions that they wouldn’t normally do.

In this case, to get access to protected systems, a criminal would pose as a member of the target company’s IT helpdesk and convince an employee to share passwords and/or multi-factor authentication codes. Although vishing is not a new tactic, the use of deepfakes and generative artificial intelligence to clone voices is making this type of social engineering harder to detect.

Just this year, companies such as Qantas, Pandora, Adidas, Chanel, Tiffany & Co. and Cisco have all been targeted using similar tactics, with millions of users affected.

Who, or what, are ShinyHunters?

ShinyHunters first emerged in 2020 and claims to have successfully attacked 91 victims so far. The group is primarily after money, but has also been willing to cause reputational damage to their victims. In 2021, ShinyHunters announced they were selling data stolen from 73 million AT&T customers.

ShinyHunters has previously targeted companies through vulnerabilities within cloud applications and website databases. By targeting customer management providers such as Salesforce, cyber criminals can gain access to rich data sets from multiple clients in one attack.

The use of social engineering techniques is considered a relatively new tactic for ShinyHunters. This change in approach has been attributed to their links with other similar groups.

In mid-August, ShinyHunters posted on Telegram they have been working with known threat actors Scattered Spider and Lapsus$ to target companies such as Salesforce and Allianz Life. The channel was taken down by Telegram within days of being launched. The group publicly released Allianz Life’s Salesforce data, which included 2.8 million data records relating to individual customers and corporate partners.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, the newly rebranded group, recently advertised they had started providing ransomware as a service. This means they will launch ransomware attacks on behalf of other groups willing to pay them.

They claim their service is better than what’s being offered by other cyber crime groups such as LockBit and Dragonforce. Rather than negotiating directly with victims, the group often publishes public extortion messages.

Who are all these cyber criminals? There’s likely a significant overlap of membership between ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider and Lapsus$. All these groups are international, with members operating on the dark web from various parts of the world.

Adding to the confusion, each group is known by multiple names. For example, Scattered Spider has been known as UNC3944, Scatter Swine, Oktapus, Octo Tempest, Storm-0875 and Muddled Libra.

How can we protect ourselves from vishing?

As everyday users and customers of large tech companies, there’s little we can do in the face of organised cyber crime groups. Keeping yourself personally safe from scams means staying constantly vigilant.

Social engineering tactics can be highly effective because they prey on human emotions and the desire to trust and to be helpful.

But companies can also be proactive about reducing the risk of being targeted by vishing tactics.

Organisations can build awareness of these tactics and build scenario-based training into employee education programs. They can also use additional verification methods, such as on-camera checks where an employee shows a corporate badge or government-issued ID, or by asking questions that cannot easily be answered with information found online.

Finally, organisations can strengthen security by using authenticator apps that require phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication such as number matching or geo-verification. Number matching requires a person to enter numbers from the identity platform into the authenticator app to approve the authentication request. Geo-verification uses a person’s physical location as an additional authentication factor.

Jennifer Medbury, Lecturer in Intelligence and Security, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Digital platforms have become the essential infrastructure of modern life. They power everything from our group chats to businesses, shopping, election campaigns and emergency coordination. They instantly connect us and continuously feed us information.

Yet although they broker information everywhere, the power of digital platforms remains largely invisible.

They control content and harvest information from behind a curtain, and avoid accountability by claiming they’re neutral. Section 230, the United States law that states online platforms can’t be treated as publishers, helps them avoid legal responsibility for the content they host.

In a new study published in Political Communication with Francesco Marolla, Marilù Miotto and Giovanni Cassani, we look behind the curtain into how this power works and what it means for democratic politics.

What is a digital platform, exactly?

When we think about digital platforms, we usually think about the apps and services we use every day, such as Google, Instagram or TikTok.

Yet digital platforms should be thought of as an ecosystem dominated by a small number of big tech companies. Governments have their own platforms in this ecosystem, such as GOV.UK or Australia’s myGov. But they still depend on private platforms – app stores, social media apps, payment systems and cloud services – to reach their citizens. The same is true for political parties and civic groups.

In our paper, we developed and tested a theory for understanding the political power of platforms.

Three forms of power

We studied Italy’s anti-establishment party, the Five Star Movement, using a large dataset of user interactions spanning five digital platforms.

The movement emerged in 2005 from its founder’s blog and, in its early years, used multiple platforms to enable direct participation. This makes it an ideal case study for understanding how platforms shape power within political organisations.

Building on previous theories, we have revealed how three critical forms of power emerge in the platform ecosystem.

Political actors either surrender or compete unequally for these powers with the owners and administrators of platforms.

Network-making power represents the ability to determine network shape and boundaries. It controls how users connect and which groups they can form, shaping their behaviour.

Networked power represents direct communication influence within networks, controlling which way the information flows and what people see.

System administration power controls access and the rules users must follow within the platform – from using pseudonyms instead of real names to the length of posts they can publish. It determines who can participate in digital political spaces and how.

Here’s how these powers play out

Platforms maintain complete control over system administration power, similar to how countries have sovereignty within their territories. Users give up control of this power when they participate in the platform ecosystem.

Platforms don’t like to exercise this power, but sometimes they do. We saw this with the systematic deplatformisation of far-right social media app Gab in 2018 or when US President Donald Trump’s social media accounts were locked in 2021 after January 6 violence on Capitol Hill.

By contrast, platform users can exercise some network-making and networked powers. For example, party leaders can mobilise supporters through viral posts and livestreams, while regular members organise local meetups and coordinate protests through online groups and events.

Platforms exercise network-making power through surveillance, control and modification of behaviours. They use algorithms and data analysis to shape user behaviours at scale, which determines how networks form and evolve. Facebook has used this power to manipulate users’ emotions and influence voting behaviour.

At the networked power level, platforms wield curation powers: they filter, amplify, or suppress content according to their goals. They decide which content ranks at the top of your news feed, and what gets ranked down or even shadowbanned.

Constrained, yet powerful

If platform owners have so much power over users, why do 96% of political parties across 48 countries still use them?

Because even under these constraints, political leaders, parties and grassroots organisations can use platforms for essential communication – and achieve their goals.

Political leaders can directly use platforms to promote collective action among their followers. This is the power Trump exercised when he tweeted “Be there, will be wild!” in December 2020 in reference to what became the Capitol Hill riots.

Meanwhile, grassroots activism can grow on platforms through “connective action”. This means people loosely coordinate online to form self-organised protest networks – examples of this are the Arab spring, the indignados in Spain and the #MeToo movement.

Political turbulence

Our findings reveal a critical issue in contemporary politics. Platforms concentrate unprecedented communication power, yet political actors remain dependent on these very systems for democratic participation.

This asymmetrical power structure has serious implications. Even when political organisations successfully use digital platforms – such as for reaching their constituents – they do so under the rules platforms have imposed.

Democratic discussion increasingly happens online, but platforms maintain full control over these digital spaces. A change in ownership or policies can abruptly disband established political networks. It can also reconfigure conversations completely.

The fragmentation of audiences across platforms creates additional problems. Our work and others shows users tend to cluster within single platforms rather than engaging across multiple spaces. This leads to distinct communities with their own communication norms and discussion topics.

This fragmentation can both strengthen and weaken political organisations. While it allows for diverse participation, it also makes it difficult to maintain consistent messaging.

All this leads to ongoing “political turbulence” where people’s attention and leadership credibility rises and falls dramatically.

Behind the scenes, digital platforms fragment public discourse while amplifying cynicism, distrust and rage-driven engagement. Their power can be repurposed to align with different goals: for financial gains, for political dominance, or for both.

Francesco Bailo, Lecturer in Data Analytics in the Social Sciences, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.